[paretoer]

Having lost 30lbs so far in 2024, you are highly under estimating the devastation of our gluttonous foodie culture.

All the factors you mention I suspect are completely meaningless in comparison to consuming excess calories and I am pretty sure research would back this up.

I was starting to have various health problems a year ago this time that have all gone away literally like magic.

I think what you are talking about is actually a form of denial. Blaming meaningless variables we can't control so we can ignore the fat elephant in the room right in front of us.

[inglor_cz]

"I am pretty sure research would back this up"

Don't be so sure. We don't really know what messed up with our satiety/hunger signals.

"our gluttonous foodie culture."

Our which one? Obesity is a global problem, not a specifically American one. You will meet a lot of obese people in Brasilian favelas or rural Serbia, not exactly places that have "foodie culture".

"Having lost 30lbs so far in 2024"

I am not trying to discourage you, but the main stumbling stone with obesity is not losing the weight, but keeping it off for years. Your comment would carry a lot more weight (pun intended) if you lost that weight in 2020 and kept it off until today.

[consteval]

> We don't really know what messed up with our satiety/hunger signals

Opinion: nothing. Our hunger/satiety signals are normal and evolutionarily advantageous. What changed was the access, and composition, of food.

Food is tasty. Like really tasty these days. High fat, sugar, salt. And it's super duper easy to get. This stuff is designed to perfect target your brain and make you say "mmm".

You wanting to eat more makes sense because these foods are highly, or over, nutritious. Cavemen didn't have fried chicken, they barely had chicken - they had nuts. This wanting to eat more and more is evolutionarily advantageous. Because you don't know when your next meal is. You should be greedy, eat as much as you can and as often as you can. I mean, look at dogs. Give them infinite access to foods and they will eat themselves to death. Sure we're smarter but much of this stuff is at a level below the brain.

For all of human history I'm sure this functionality was a very good thing. Now that we have food surplus... not anymore. And to top it off, for the first time ever, we don't need to move to live. People are sedentary. So we don't even offset this effect with movement.

It seems to me the human brain/body is incompatible with modern human life. We're broken. We're exploitable by addiction at every turn. The solution might be to change our brains. Ozempic seems to help a lot - less drinking and smoking too.

[photon_lines]

I 100% agree - I just wanted to add that processed food also plays a huge role. Our ancestors didn't eat canned fish dipped in high calorie oils or snacks / junk food with no fiber. White bread is used commonly throughout many households but whole-grains are a lot healthier. Eating food which has a high degree of high fructose corn-syrup or sugar with no added fiber has a detrimental effect on health and is not something that our bodies are used to. The high-glycemic index spikes our bodies go through when you combine these factors does a ton of damage to our health and yes - I believe it does have a role in triggering auto-immune reactions. Type 1 diabetics as an example are diabetic due to their own immune systems falsely labelling the pancreas beta-cells as enemies and triggering an auto-immune response -- the reason I believe this happens is due to the high-inflammatory reaction our pancreas go through when we eat extremely highly processed foods (i.e. high sugar / glycemic index items with high insulin spikes & lacking fiber). I don't have a lot of data to prove any of this - so this is my hypothesis but I can confirm that ever since I started staying away from processed foods, I've been in amazing health and I feel much better than when I was slightly over-weight and consuming processed junk.

[inglor_cz]

The interesting thing is that Vietnamese food is really tasty (I love it at least), but Viet Nam is something like 2 per cent fat. And they don't suffer from shortages of food.

Vietnamese people in Czechia are also usually thin, even though they make more than average money, being either business owners or skilled professionals. The contrast with Czechs is visible.

[arde]

It's probably the carbs.

[consteval]

Probably not, since carbs have always been the easiest food to get and they didn't have this problem. Protein, and especially meat, was always rare and a minority of diet. But greens, fruits, nuts (ish, they have fat) are plentiful.

[jasonvorhe]

I don't understand the reply, tbh. I didn't imply that people in the West tend to eat too much.

I'm actually baffled that anything I mentioned would be considered "completely meaningless".